The Thirst Quenchers

by Rick Raphael

A dozen red lights flicked on among the thousands of green pinpoints of illumination on the huge mural map of the area indicating gauges not reporting due to malfunctions. The technician on duty compared the red lights with the trouble sheet in his hand. He noted two new numbers on the list. When he came to C11902-87, he glanced again at the map. A minute, steady green ray came from the tiny dot in the center of a contour circle that indicated a nameless peak in the Sawtooth Range.

The technician lined out C11902-87 on the trouble chart. "They got to that one in a hurry," he murmured to himself. Another figure had been returned to the accuracy percentage forecasting figures of the huge computers that dictated the lives and luxuries of more than a half a billion Americans.

Water, not gold, now set the standard of living for an overpopulated, overindustrialized continent, where the great automated farms and ranches fought desperately to produce the food for a half billion stomachs while competing with that same half billion for every drop of life-giving moisture that went into the soil.

In the winter, the snows and early fall rains fell in the watershed mountains of the continent, then melted and either seeped into the soil or first trickled, then gushed and finally leaped in freshets down from the highlands to the streams and rivers. As the great cities spread and streamflow waters were dammed and stored and then metered out, there was no longer enough to meet agricultural, industrial and municipal needs.

The cities sent down shaft after shaft into the underground aquifers, greedily sucking the moisture out of the land until each day, each month and each year, the water tables fell deeper and deeper until they, too, were gone, and the land was sucked dry.

There was water in the highlands, in watersheds and spilling unused down to the sea in many areas. Soon the cities and industries sent out great plastisteel arteries to bring the lifeblood of the land to the vast sponges of the factories and showers in home and food-processing plants and landrounits. Water for the machine-precise rows of soy bean plants and for babies' formulas and water for great nuclear power plants and water for a tiny, sixty-fifth floor apartment flower box.

But there was never enough and a nation finally could no longer evade the situation that had been forewarned and foredoomed a century earlier by the pioneers of conservation.

Only by total conservation of every possible drop of moisture could the nation survive, and to conserve, it is first necessary to have an accurate and constantly-current inventory of the substance that is to be conserved.

To the executive branch of the government had come the Secretary of Water Resources, and with the creation of the new cabinet office, the former cabinet posts of Agriculture and Interior were relegated to subordinate and divisional status.

To the thousands upon thousands of trained hydrologists, meteorologists and agronomists of the federal agencies of agriculture, interior and commerce fell the task of manipulating and guiding the delicate balance of the world's water cycle. The snows and rains fell upon the earth, to soak into the land, flow down the streams and rivers to the sea or to the great lakes, and then be returned to the atmosphere to fall again in the ageless cycle of life.